Category: MUSPA WINNERS

WRIT BY ANOTHER HAND

by Kirsten Mckenzie (New Zealand)

His sleep eternal,

Our gracious English Bard.

We beg death a lie,

Bemoan his passing a timeless tragedy.

A ripe apple, decaying, leaving us desolate.

Oh, sweet melancholy, his unwavering words now perform,

His fulsome labour wrapped in a cloak of divinity.

Scholars feast upon his utterances, devoted servants, their love pure,

Still, we beseech the delivery of more dogged investigations.

Reason flees as time falls, and Marlowe grows,

A usurper from his pages begs consideration.

How can we perceive truth’s history?

Was it writ by Shakespeare,

Or by another hand?

Their sleep eternal.

WHEN

by Victoria Ojo Ilemobayo (Nigeria)

Darling,

When all stars are dim

And are tired of twinkling…

When the sun is gloomy

And refuses to give his light…

When your heart is heavy

And tired of transmitting melodies…

Darling,

Like Shakespeare, I will draw nigh

And flood your sour soul with rhythms

Of love.

SHAKESPEARIAN SONNET 101

by Paul Adrian Fried (USA)

Iambic feet are weak at first, then strong —

a gentle peck, and then a deeper kiss.

Pentameter’s a line that’s five feet long,

so iambs in pentameter, like this,

can help to make a sonnet’s rhythm soar.

Now quatrains — those are four-line sets, you see,

and Shakespeare often rhymed lines two and four

in each quatrain — and also one and three.

In quatrain one, the poem begins its way.

In two, it still unwinds and roams about.

In three, a twist or turn comes into play,

and then the final couplet. Have no doubt:

The sonnet, like a ballroom floor, can be

a form where words go leaping, dancing free.